Simon Wachsmuth, "Baustelle" 2005, Ausstellungsansicht Galerie Hohenlohe 2006 Foto: Wolfgang Woessner

Galerie Hohenlohe Bäckerstrasse 3 A-1010 Vienna Austria (city map) Send E-mail tel +43 (0)1 - 512 97 20 www.galeriehohenlohe.at

Jutta Strohmaier, Simon Wachsmuth

In its current show, the Gallery Hohenlohe juxtaposes two artistic positions that, at first glance, don't seem to have much to do with each other. While Strohmaier's works live to a large degree from movement in space and perceptual games, Wachsmuth usually presents a condition or a detail that one initially regards with confusion. Different in content and form, parallels can, however, be seen in the methods and approaches of both: They create abstractions out of something that exists. For Strohmaier, nature is the model from which the question about the structuring of social spaces is asked, for Wachsmuth, history. Through their actions in spaces, what relationships do people enter, and how are the spaces changed? Both positions consider the active involvement with space. Here space is no longer seen as static, its own reality, but rather the result of human actions.

Jutta Srohmaier's work is entitled "In the Thicket", not merely "Thicket", and thus shows that basically the thicket is not important, but the positioning, the framing in space. This space is assembled by the placing of objects in the dark room, in this case, bundles of branches, which create a multi-dimensional matrix through the objects' movements and new lighting. The photograms that result have no space-time concurrence and define their own visual reality. Clear space and time parameters are also missing in the video of the same name. Made of individual photographs that have been combined and digitally reworked, this trick film avoids a clear expression of space. The space being explored seems to disintegrate, is superimposed, and finally dissolves into the blue sky. In Jutta Strohmaier's artistic language, one can feel the familiar and the unfamiliar side by side; moreover, she shifts between several dimensions of the portrayal and the changing medium.

Simon Wachsmuth's art contains no colours; it is at once reserved and sparing, its contents complex. His "Construction Zone" consists of orderly piled black and white painted wooden boards and a video that shows lively pictures of construction zones, which are also reduced to the contrast of black and white. The first impression is that the work is either not yet finished, quite the reverse, it has to begin, the scaffolding has to be built, or that the thirty boards are what remains from a construction site. Maybe they were simply forgotten or left behind and will soon be picked up by a person who passes by unexpectedly and used as a desk or a shelf. As it may, the construction zone is a transitory place, a sort of in-between space that permits something new. Like all Simon Wachsmuth's works, the construction zone is somewhere in-between, if one likes, a negative image, a device that allows an application that can be thought about and developed further. An end is not in sight.